Three Months of Privately Mourning David Bowie in Public

The most cathartic moment of last week’s two Music of David Bowie tribute shows came about halfway through Thursday night’s program. Michael Stipe stepped out onto the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall in a secular shaman’s costume of blazer, skirt worn over pants, a heavy ring on his left hand, and a septum piercing brushing the top of his wild Walt Whitman beard. “Whether or not he is here in this room,” Stipe said of Bowie, “he is most certainly here in this room.”

With the composer Paul Cantelon accompanying him on somber, rumbling piano and Karen Elson’s backing vocals coolly underlining his whispered verses, Stipe sang “Ashes to Ashes” as though leading a benediction, his hushed voice occasionally levitating to the higher reaches of his range. At times, some force external to his body seemed to be conducting his limbs, lifting his arms and turning his palms out to the audience.

Stipe made no attempt to mimic Bowie’s live performances of “Ashes to Ashes,” which played up its multiple narrative voices and accelerated its space-rock nursery rhyme melody even as Bowie’s eyes radiated the terror contained in its lyrics. In a literal sense, that terror comes from the addict’s discovery that he’s drifted too far from reality. But the song gains a more universal resonance through the impression it leaves of youth wasted — of years adding up, empty of meaning. Bowie released “Space Oddity” when he was 22; when he revisited the Major Tom character here in 1980 at age 33, he had just concluded perhaps the most creatively productive decade in rock history yet dismissed the work in interviews, saying things like, “I don’t feel much of it has any import at all.” In his twenties, Bowie had believed he would die before reaching 30, which might explain why the voice of “Ashes to Ashes” sounds so old. There’s a close-up in the music video where you can see lines beginning to show around Bowie’s eyes.

Stipe’s was the most moving tribute I’ve seen so far because it so reverently refuted Bowie’s own skepticism about his own impact, expressed in lyrics like, “I’ve never done good things/ I’ve never done bad things/ I never did anything out of the blue.” He transformed “Ashes to Ashes” from a rock song that despaired at the impossibility of achieving meaning in one’s life, into a prayer for meaning that outlived its maker.

My favorite performances were neither the ones that sounded the most perfect nor the ones that, like Lady Gaga’s well-intentioned Grammys medley, tried to replicate Bowie’s style or presence. The tributes that stuck with me were the ones that seemed like they could only have come from the artist in question. Cyndi Lauper opened Thursday’s show by bouncing onstage with big, pink hair in her eyes, gamely sharing the mic for “Suffragette City” with Bowie’s longtime collaborator Tony Visconti, who led a skillful house band that also included Spiders From Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey. Her exuberance excused any dropped lyrics. Later that night, Laurie Anderson ignored any boundary between the dead and the living—“Hello, David. Hi, darling,” she said—and drew out the noise in “Always Crashing in the Same Car” with electric violin. The Mountain Goats (“Word on a Wing”) and TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone (“The Bewlay Brothers”) brought a certain intimacy to the non-hits they chose, singing each lyric as though they’d spent years decoding it. Cat Power’s full-bodied low notes and wild high notes sounded smoother Friday, but my breath caught at the end of her “Five Years” on Thursday, when her voice felt fragile enough to shatter.

The common factor in these tributes and earlier standouts like Lorde’s Brit Awards performance of “Life on Mars?”, as well as the best writing on Bowie since his death, is how personal they all are. Perhaps it sounds self-evident that eulogies should come from the heart, but that wasn’t a foregone conclusion in the case of someone whose reputation pivoted on a cliché about protean glamor — an artist who created so many personae that it was common to misguidedly wonder whether he even had a core self. In the 21st century, and particularly during the decade when he wasn’t releasing new music, Bowie’s influence on the culture often got reduced to breathless copy on a photo spread of vaguely androgynous fashion. The quintessential acts of Bowie fandom seemed to be performative, or at least public: the clothes, the sexuality, the hedonism.

But loving any musician is a mostly solitary act, whether that love is manifested through raw infatuation or deep engagement with the music itself, and the connection fans felt to David Bowie was no exception. His death finally dragged into the light everything he meant to people in private. The masses of us who mourned in public, in essays and on social media and in the streets of New York and London and Berlin, didn’t usually end up recounting all the crazy shit we did under his influence or even reminiscing about the ways his music fostered community.

The portrait of the Bowie fan that emerged instead was surprisingly introspective, in story after story of teenagers listening to Ziggy Stardustor Hunky Doryalone in our bedrooms, finding the courage to be queer or weird or to just keep living, and returning to those albums for decades afterwards whenever we needed an inoculation against hopelessness. Instead of spacemen we were all the mousey-haired girl from “Life on Mars?,” looking to art to kick down the walls of our claustrophobic worlds. (It’s been strange watching that song become TV shorthand for “sad, unmoored young woman,” but as an encapsulation of Bowie’s relationship to his fans, its recent ascendance seems appropriate.)

Since 2010 I’ve worked just a few blocks from Bowie’s final New York home on Lafayette Street in Soho, so I couldn’t help but spend plenty of January mourning my private (though by no means unique) connection to him in public. On my way to buy lunch, I watched fans of all ages leave offerings of flowers and drawings; going home at night, I detoured to find them lighting candles. It’s not that conversations didn’t take place, but we all seemed primarily committed to our personal reveries. Most of the time, I was listening to Lodgerwith headphones on.

I decided to leave the job around the corner from Bowie’s apartment in February, partially because his death and his mortality-obsessed work and all that he was able to accomplish in such small windows of time had reminded me that my life isn’t infinite. Five years suddenly felt like a long time to be in the same place, physically and figuratively. Six would have been too many. Nearly every discussion I had with other people who loved Bowie this winter involved a mutual admission that his death had sunk us into self-scrutiny. So many of us were ashamed to have lost the urgency he had helped us access, as kids, about living.

Perhaps he would even have preferred it to a pair of tribute concerts that provided their share of beautiful moments, charity events he must have agreed to without knowing whether he would live to see them. “I wish I were a bigger Bowie fan so I could do a better job nitpicking,” I heard a woman say as we filed out of Radio City Friday night. She was right: I could’ve made her a list of every false note. But my heart wouldn’t have been in it. Two nights of these shows had destroyed my appetite for nitpicking. I felt like sharing the experience, not tearing it down.

Both the Carnegie Hall and Radio City performances ended with the peppy maestros of a Toronto choral group called Choir! Choir! Choir! leading the crowd in a “Space Oddity” sing-along. I can’t say I enjoyed it, either night. There are few experiences more awkward than singing words you cried over in high school in a theater full of other people who probably did the same. As a means of liberation from three months of private mourning, though, it might actually have worked.